Having stolen another general election through gerrymandering electoral boundaries, stacking the rolls, buying votes and otherwise rigging the ballot, now the BN gang is more hell-bent than ever on giving its competitors in crime the bullet.

This BN band of thieves and killers has long employed its police as its security guards and enforcers in its bid to monopolise organized crime, of course, but current Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi is as far as I know the first regime functionary to make the “shoot first” policy openly official.

In the process going so far as attempting to justify blue murder of ‘suspects’ on “humanitarian” grounds, and also to blasphemously blame it on the Almighty.

“Shootings every day, murders almost every week,” he lamented with all the pseudo-sanctimony at his command. “This needs to be dealt with. If I don’t do something, not only will the public question my credibility, but on Judgment Day, Allah will question me.”

As if an entity as all-seeing and all-knowing as Allah allegedly is would not already be well aware of what Hamidi and his BN accomplices are actually up to.

Anybody with even the slightest grip on reality can tell that that Malaysia’s forces of so-called law and order are interested exclusively in fighting non-BN crime.

In other words, they’re engaged in a gang-war with those criminals so daring or desperate as to disdain the regime’s demands for a share in the proceeds of their nefarious deeds.

As we have seen on literally countless occasions, any “suspects” who step out of line or can’t be forcibly persuaded to co-operate or cough-up enough cash have a way of mysteriously dying in “shoot-outs” or suffering “sudden death” in custody.

Many citizens in their innocence have been able to convince themselves that such killings were the work of “rogue” police sadistically getting their kicks.

But the virtually complete lack of any proper investigations of such highly suspicious deaths, let alone prosecution of the offenders involved, has clearly revealed these abuses to be both deliberate and systematic.

So Hamidi’s admission that a “shoot-first” policy is surprising not so much in its substance as its utter shamelessness.

Like his much-touted amendment to the so-called “Prevention of Crime” Act, which is clearly intended to be used so selectively against non-BN criminals that it should be called the Protection of Regime Crime Act.

But of course most regime crime is protected not by drastic measures like shooting or beating competitors to death or two years’ imprisonment under the Act, but by the simple expedient of taking no action at all.

And no arm of the BN government is so expert in the field of no action than the ludicrously mis-named Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC).

Perennially apparently powerless to perceive, let alone proceed against corruption on such massive scales as evident in cases like those of multi-billionaire Chief Minister of Sarawak, Abdul ‘The Termite’ Taib Mahmud and the Najib Abdul Razak-involved Scorpene Sumarines scandal, the MACC now claims to be helpless against even smaller-scale graft revealed as so rife by the Auditor-General’s Report.

In fact, speaking this week at a forum on the Audit Report 2012, MACC chief Abu Kassim Mohamed had the hide to implicitly deny any corruption on the part of those responsible for the theft and wastage of countless millions of ringgit in public funds by attributing the losses not to deliberate dishonesty, but “carelessness and stupidity.”

Conceding that there might be a measly 15 cases of possible corruption worthy of MACC attention, Abu Kassim pretended to lament that laws in Malaysia “do not provide for carelessness and stupidity to be charged as offences.”

Having thus declared most of the thieves in the BN regime’s civil services to be above and beyond the reach of the law, he then went on to spout motherhood remarks like “the government must improve its procedures when it comes to procurements so that government departments do not buy items at way above market price.”

“We are angry too (about this situation),” Malaysiakini quoted him as claiming. “The department heads must see the department as though it is his or her own company. They can’t take a lackadaisical attitude and say, oh, it’s just the government’s money.”

As Abu Kassim knows very well, it is not in fact the government’s money, it’s the people’s money. And the only reason he and his MACC accomplices are employed at public expense is to ensure that the people’s money isn’t stolen by the government and its so-called civil servants.

But what can you expect of a man who himself heads a department that has not only totally failed in its avowed purpose of combatting corruption, but has also contributed its share to the toll of deaths in official custody.

The fact that Abu Kassim is still in his job, and members of his staff suspected of responsibility for the deaths of witness Teoh Beng Hock and others are still on the MACC payroll, is further evidence of the BN gang’s war against any crime but its own.

As is the fact that at least significant sectors of the judiciary are clearly shoulder-to-shoulder with the police and MACC in riding shotgun for the regime, along with virtually all of the mainstream media.

So presumably the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) was firing blanks last week when it claimed to have sent Home Minister Ahmed Zahid Hamedi an email urging him to shed the “uncivilized” attitude he displayed in rejecting probing questions by Malaysiakini journalist Lawrence Yong.

Because, let’s face it, the low-calibre and no-calibre journalists of the mainstream media, NUJ members and non-members alike, are as much to blame as any group for keeping the BN gang in power. And thus as complicit in its crime-related killings as if they’d pulled the trigger themselves.